Napalm Death-Scum

Napalm Death has had a huge affect on my musical life. Not only did they make me truly appreciate other crust punk bands, they also have had an influence in my songwriting. I am someone that strongly believes in the crust punk genre (I just call it crust). For those of you that don't know what crust is, it's basically hardcore punk mixed with a metal genre. Some crust bands are Napalm Death (punk mixed with brutal death and grindcore), Hatebreed (punk mixed with thrash metal), Darkthrone's newer material (punk mixed with thrash metal and black metal), Black Flag (punk mixed with thrash metal), and Extreme Noise Terror (punk mixed with death metal). Black Flag was really the first band to start the crust trend. Obviously they got their influences from Venom and Slayer, who formed right before Scum was released. I personally have been growing up listening to Napalm Death due to my older sister playing it in her car and at her house a lot. Out of all of the works of art that Napalm Death has produced, Scum still stands out to me as being a huge landmark in music and a masterpiece.

Scum has a quality that for some reason I love, which is the low quality recording quality. I have this weakness for music that has been recorded with a very raw sound, and very little editing. It shows basically that the band doesn't need any editing to make the recordings better (and also that the band/record label didn't have the equipment or money to edit them). Scum also covers a huge variety of genres, such as hardcore punk, crust, grindcore, brutal death, thrash death, death metal, drone, and speed metal. And to just about every album, there are downsides. The biggest ones are that Lee's vocal style is something that has to take some getting used to, and the drummer uses way too much symbols in some songs. Otherwise, the creativity is outstanding, and the musicianship is very enjoyable. The really fuzzy distortion that the bassist uses sounds really interesting when he plays alone, but it really adds a different kind of distortion to the band's music that sounds outstanding. I would recommend looking at the lyrics for this album, because most of them really give a realistic and accurate view of the mainstream style of living from the perspective of a metalhead that is far away from everything mainstream.

This isn't an album that was meant to be partially listened to. To get the best enjoyment from this album, listen to it when you know you won't get interrupted or have to skip songs. Otherwise, you won't feel truly satisfied. The song that stands out to me the most is the title song. It's obviously the song that they worked on and practiced the most. Divine Death and Parasites are really influential songs that really play around with the elements of thrash metal and grindcore. I noticed that this album possesses the shortest song in existence. You Suffer is about .4 seconds long! That's less than half a second! This album would impress mostly people who are diehard fans of brutal music. This would also be a good album to show people who are still new to the elements of brutal metal. Since first listening to them when I was 12, I have seen them perform twice; both of those times being an amazingly brutal experience, this gets 18/20.